Editing Gene Leroy Hart (section)

===The murders===
Less than two months before the murders, during an on-site training session, a counselor at Camp Scott discovered that her belongings had been ransacked and her doughnuts had been stolen. Inside the empty doughnut box was a hand-written note, stating in capital letters, "We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one." The director of that camp session treated the note as a prank, and it was discarded.

At around 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 12, 1977, the night before camp started, a thunderstorm hit the area and the girls huddled in their tents. Among them were Lori Lee Farmer (8), Doris Denise Milner (10), and Michele Heather Guse (9). The girls were all residents of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. They were sharing tent #8 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit which was located the farthest from the camp counselor's tent, and partially obscured by the showers for the camp.

At around 6 a.m. on June 13, a camp counselor on her way to the shower found a girl's body in her sleeping bag in the forest. It was soon discovered that all three girls in tent #8 had been murdered. Their bodies had been left on a trail leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent. Subsequent testing showed that they had been raped, bludgeoned, and strangled. A large, red flashlight was found on top of the girls' bodies; a fingerprint was found on the lens, but it has never been identified. A footprint from a 9.5 shoe size was also found in the blood in the tent.